Charly Bliss, Forever

Last December, I had one of those futile yet inevitable oh-God-I’m-getting-so-old freakouts when I realized that Tavi Gevinson’s Editor’s Letter from the “Forever” Issue of Rookie—an online magazine that I read religiously throughout all of high school—was turning ten years old. At 25, I revisited this fundamental text, one in which Gevinson defined “forever” as “the state exclusive to those between the ages of 13 and 17, in which one feels both eternally invincible and permanently trapped.” Gevinson wrote this letter during her senior year of high school, grappling with the impending “End of Forever,” already steeped in nostalgia for the soon-to-no-longer-be-the-present. “Forever is when you experience all kinds of things for the first time, as do your hormones, which will never again be this crazed, never again experience things as either so bleak or so Technicolor. Forever is when your brain is still developing, so everything sticks, like a lot,” she wrote.

It was impossible for me not to think of Gevinson’s words when Charly Bliss announced their long-awaited third album, Forever, alongside lead single “Nineteen”—a slow, keys-and-synth ballad full of self-contradicting confessions. “Can I be honest? / How can I hide that I want you? / Tell me how’d you get so far? / You’re always breaking my heart,” Eva Hendricks sings at the chorus. In her Editor’s Letter, Gevinson quoted a previous interview that she had done with Sofia Coppola, a filmmaker whose distinctive narrative and aesthetic sensibilities were made famous through the stories she told about teenage girls. “I always like characters that are in the midst of a transition and trying to find their place in the world and their identity,” Coppola told her. “That is most heightened when you’re a teenager, but I definitely like it at different stages of life.”

During my conversation with Eva Hendricks, she sums up Forever in a similar framing to Gevinson’s and Coppola’s—one that extracts its emotional resources from the potency of adolescence: “I’m a big feeler, and there’s no time when you have bigger tsunami waves of feeling.” A lot of Eva’s artistic influences are ones that tap into intensely teenage feelings and experiences. She and her bandmates have been vocal about their love of Weezer—she calls Weezer’s Blue Album “a pop album hidden among fuzzy guitars”—a band whose early output seems designed to appeal to the obsessive impulses of angst-ridden teenagers.

Charly Bliss often come across as the kind of band you’d see playing a guest spot on a teen drama, like the Flaming Lips performing on Beverly Hills 90210, Death Cab For Cutie performing on The O.C., or Sonic Youth performing on either of the GGs (Girlmore Girls or Gossip Girl—take your pick, they’ve played both). Eva also cites the fictional bands of early 2000s teen movies as major inspirations behind Charly Bliss: “We would not be a band if it weren’t for Josie and the Pussycats or 10 Things I Hate About You.” After Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack composer Adam Schlesinger passed away in 2020, Charly Bliss covered “Pretend to Be Nice” for a memorial compilation. At a few of their live shows, they’ve dueted “Pretend to Be Nice” and the film’s other signature song, “3 Small Words,” with Kay Hanley of Letters To Cleo (who performed the original soundtrack versions).

Charly Bliss songs tend to be concerned with not necessarily feeling good, but with feeling as much as possible. As a songwriter, Eva want “to make music that knocks you over.” This need to shake people or situations out of stasis comes through in Charly Bliss’s shimmery power pop songs that often serve as outlets for the most dramatic, over-the-top versions of Eva and her impulses. “Crush” is a word she uses almost literally, worthless if you’re not crumpling or exploding under its weight. Eva writes about hard-and-fast heartbreak as the flip side of ecstatic infatuation, often focusing on the blinding brightness of love when you’re young and combustible.

The chaos of “Nineteen” is in her rearview, a flaming car crash trailing smoke in the distance. Eva’s far enough from it to know logically that the worst is behind her and it should stay there, but there’s a part of her that wants nothing more than to follow the smell of burning rubber all the way back to the wreckage. The compromise of nostalgia is a common and, to some extent, necessary one, and “Nineteen” is like lighting a candle off the flames and keeping it in a glass jar. At a safe, stable distance, the memory can become something other than itself—horrible when it’s happening, magical and awe-inspiring in hindsight.

Forever is Charly Bliss’s full-tilt into maximalist pop. While their previous work had its rock band analogs, Forever shares more similarities with solo albums, specifically the sparkly mess of 2010s landmark records from cult divas—Sky Ferreira’s Night Time, My Time and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion being the most immediate comparisons. Lyrically, Forever is caught in the conflict of wanting stability and not knowing what to do with that stability once you have it, trying to resist the urges to ruin a good thing. “Let’s make it a habit / Love so good it’s tragic / Once you let me drive the car you know I’m gonna crash it,” Eva coos over flickering synths on album opener “Tragic.”

On the following “Calling You Out” she can’t resist starting fights when things seem too good to be true: “Hard to believe that you need me / Maybe I’ll force you to leave me / Promise that love can be easy / I’m too scared to try.” The pitched up gang vocals on the bridge of “Back There Now” serve as Eva’s conscience when she starts getting tempted to return to a guy who made her life hell, but at least made it exciting: “Sometimes I miss you / But I already know / A boy like you would hang me if I gave you the rope.” Forever is, in large part, about learning that oftentimes the trade-off for the lows not being quite so low is that the highs, in turn, aren’t as high. The act of breathing doesn’t necessarily become more meaningful when your head is being held underwater, but it sure can feel that way.

In a way, every Charly Bliss album is a coming-of-age album. Their 2017 debut Guppy is made up of bubblegrunge tracks about navigating the misadventures of your early twenties: sometimes you win, sometimes your boyfriend leaves you for his cousin (“Westermarck”), sometimes you become embroiled in an obsessive one-sided competition with your new boyfriend’s ex (“Julia”), sometimes you pee your pants on a trampoline (“DQ”), sometimes you pass out on the subway and cope by penning an ode to your therapist (“Ruby”).

Instead of the grungy, ‘90s-evocative sound that characterized Guppy, the instrumentation on Charly Bliss’ last album, 2019’s Young Enough, was sleek and synth-led, taking more of its cues from new wave bands of the 80s like Blondie and Talking Heads, as well as Lorde’s 2017 opus Melodrama. Narratively, it arrived more streamlined than Guppy. One could even call it a concept album. Young Enough begins with the same lingering, twenty-something malaise, and its aimlessness and determined search for meaning are the catalysts for an explosive, dangerous relationship that pulls Eva underwater after she jumps in headfirst: “I am diving to drown in you,” she sings on the title track. Young Enough felt—and feels—like repeatedly making mistakes that you thought you were too old, too experienced, and too smart to make.

“I felt like we were trying to project like ‘We grew up! We’re taking ourselves seriously!’” Eva says, of Young Enough. “On [Forever] it was so important for all of us to return to the same sense of playfulness that we had on Guppy.” Eva clarifies that while she loves Young Enough and is incredibly proud of what she and her bandmates accomplished on that record, she’s also aware of just how much pressure the band put on themselves while making it. On Forever, the recording process was looser. Working with Caleb Wright and Jake Luppen of Hippo Campus on the record helped make the atmosphere more intuitive and carefree—Eva describes the two as “so playful, and so committed to fun and joy in the studio.”

While Forever fortunately eschews the often-implied stuffiness of a so-called “mature” album, it does feel noticeably more reflective than previous Charly Bliss LPs. “I Don’t Know Anything” almost becomes a self-directed diss track, one that starts off with Eva staring down a crowd and her wide-eyed past, reckoning with the tandem satisfaction and letdown of achieving a longstanding goal: “When we got started I dreamed of this place / Staring up at the boys in their jeans on the stage / Now that we’re here I just feel sort of vacant / Come way too far to feel vaguely complacent.” It doesn’t feel all that different from the more insecure moments on another album that’s taken the summer by storm, Charli xcx’s BRAT (every member of Charly Bliss works a day job in addition to being a musician, and I’m sure all of them can relate to having “one foot in a normal life”).

It’s refreshing to hear artists talk as candidly about their careers and self-perception as Eva does on “I Don’t Know Anything,” especially when it’s done without an air of self-seriousness. Eva’s superpower is her ability to be in on the joke while also being the butt of it (“As ‘90s rock revivalists, we’re just too late,” she sings), but her humor always stems from an emotionally honest place. “I think it’s important to talk about the state of the music industry,” she tells me. “People get really angry about it. They’re like ‘But you chose this!’ And I’m like, ‘You don’t think I’ve thought about that? You don’t think I’ve been out here wondering if I made the wrong choice? Does what I’m doing matter enough to justify being a person in my thirties with no savings?’ I wanted to express that in a song. I’ve already thought of all this shit, it’s on a constant loop in my head.”

“I’m Not Dead” almost feels like a counterpoint to the anxieties of “I Don’t Know Anything,” an argument in favor of acting now and regretting later (or not!). “If I’m a rockstar, I’m not doing it right / Tapped out at 29,” Eva laments. In some ways, “I’m Not Dead” feels like a spiritual sequel to Young Enough’s “Capacity,” another song in which Eva tries to liberate herself from the pressure to please everyone. “I’m Not Dead,” isn’t Eva claiming to have never made any mistakes, she just isn’t sure that she made the right ones. “I wish I’d fucked up twice as much and had like double the fun!” she exclaims before the chorus, reminding me of a panel from the Achewood comic strip that I quote probably too often, the one of Ray Smuckles remarking, “I wish in the past I had tried more things ‘cause now I know that being in trouble is a fake idea.”

The playfulness and enthusiasm of Forever falls in line with the sort of “always-growing-up” ethos that Charly Bliss have cultivated over their trilogy of albums. Their creative philosophy of perpetual adolescence feels distinct from the dumbed-down “I’m just a girl” self-infantilism and youth fetishism that’s been rotting through the more shallow, saccharine aspects of pop culture for the past few years. Rather, it’s a way of staying humble and open-minded. “Almost everyone I know and love feels like they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” Eva says. “And when I do meet people that act like they have it all figured out, I’m like, ‘You’re lying. It’s okay, you can drop the act!’”

Constantly coming-of-age doesn’t mean living in some fantasy world devoid of real-life stakes or responsibilities where everything is carefree and fun all the time—in fact, it means meeting reality as bluntly and vulnerably as possible. It means challenging yourself to learn and grow whenever you can, to admit your faults, to feel the negative feelings as deeply and profoundly as the positive ones. It means understanding that wonder isn’t a finite resource. It means approaching the future with all the fear and excitement that it demands and walking into the unknown heart-first.

Once again, I find myself returning to one of Tavi Gevinson’s Editor’s Letters—not the “Forever” one from December 2013, but the one from the following month’s issue, whose “Vision” theme focuses on looking forward rather than back. In it, Tavi talks about listening to “Alex Chilton” by The Replacements and connecting with the song’s chorus, which to her captures “such a teenage feeling of discovery followed by immediate obsession.” But then, Tavi changes her tune: “It can be a me feeling, too; a simply human feeling, if you go about being a human in a fulfilling way. Instead of following this magical feeling with a mournful one like I have been lately—ENJOY IT, SOON YOU’LL BE OLD AND JADED AND EMOTIONALLY REPRESSED—I followed it this time with one of excitement, anticipation, just plain positivity. Not because I’m depending on the future being great, but because I know it will at least be itself, aka more living, aka more feeling.”

For Eva, her bandmates are a big part of what keeps her young, in part because Charly Bliss are a band of people who’ve grown up together: “Dan and Spencer have been my friends since middle school, and Sam is my older brother, and the fact that we’ve gotten to tour the world and play these shows and have people care about our music—that itself is was the biggest dream of my life.” The five years between Young Enough and Forever were a time of major upheaval for Charly Bliss. Eva’s brother/drummer Sam became a father; the COVID-19 lockdown extended what Eva thought would be a visit to Australia into an indefinite stay. While she was there, she found a new community, fell in love, got engaged and made it her permanent home, which meant that most of the writing and recording of Forever was done remotely.

In the early days of the pandemic, Eva felt unmoored in an unfamiliar place, unsure when she and her bandmates would be able to tour or even see each other again: “I remember watching videos of us playing shows and missing it so much,” she says. Eva found herself wishing that she’d appreciated that time more in the moment instead of worrying about all the insecurities documented in songs like “I’m Not Dead,” letting her anxiety get in the way of being present. “The best thing ever happened in my life and I missed it because I was caught up thinking about the wrong things,” she laments. Eva says that Forever is a record about “falling back in love with being in a band.” The last three tracks are all love songs, but while “Easy to Love You” and “Last First Kiss” are romantic in the traditional sense, “Waiting For You” is about Eva’s bandmates. “They’ve seen me at my absolute lowest and my absolute best,” she tells me. On “Waiting For You,” she sings about their friendship and creative partnership with the meant-to-be cadence of a rom-com love confession: “I forgot somehow I can’t do it without you / I’m yours no doubt, I was always waiting for you.”

Eva and I were speaking over Zoom (her in Los Angeles, me in Brooklyn), but a few weeks before our call I met up with her bandmates for an in-person group interview. We met up at a bar around the corner from ground zero of the infamous non-neighborhood Dimes Square, as the sweltering July afternoon cooled into evening, and attempted to beat the heat with gin martinis and oysters. The oysters inspired a digression—the first of many, many digressions over the course of our interview—about a brand partnership that Charly Bliss did with Blue Point Brewing Company. “We got paid to do this ad for Blue Point Brewing in The Fader,” bassist Dan Shure explains. “And they gave us unlimited oysters shucked in front of us. But it was like 11 in the morning and we hadn’t eaten anything and there was no lemon, horseradish, mignonette—nothing, just raw, unadorned oysters. Just raw-dogging oysters.”

“And we had a nervous shucker,” adds guitarist Spencer Fox.

“A real nervous shucker,” Dan agrees.

The story about the oysters reminds me of the videos Charly Bliss sometimes upload to their TikTok account, occasionally satirizing branded content that aims to be relatable—“Mmmyeah, it’s feeling like a Toyota summer to me…Liberty Mutual is such a slay,” Spencer quips with decreasing enthusiasm as Charli xcx’s 360 plays in the background of a TikTok captioned “trying to generate viral audio that will help us get brand deals.” Another video shows the band members taking turns “thanking Spotify” for adding their song “You Don’t Even Know Me Anymore” to a series of made-up playlists with titles like “Girly Rock Anthems For Punk Mamas Who Slay The Patriarchy” and “Cottage Cheese Cottagecore.” These types of playlists come up in our conversation. “They’re all bad, but we should be on all of them,” is Spencer’s take. “Don’t get me wrong, we’re making fun of ourselves,” he adds. “We like to do bits where we pretend we’re way bigger than we are.”

“It’s still shocking that anyone knows who we are, so it’s okay for us to pretend we’re divas,” Dan continues.

Spencer stirs the pot even further: “There’s a large community of men on the internet that truly believe we’re ‘selling out,’ it’s fun to play into it.” I’m once again thinking of “I Don’t Know Anything,” a song in which Eva asks point blank, “What does it mean to sell out?”

“Selling out is such an archaic concept,” furthers drummer Sam Hendricks. “People talk about selling out like we’re a 2000s band and record labels have all this money to throw at us. There’s no such thing as selling out anymore.”

“And honey, if there was, we’d have done it by now,” says Spencer.

The concept of “selling out” might’ve held water 20 or 30 years ago, when making a living off touring and record sales was at least a somewhat viable option. Maybe in the ‘90s it made sense to feel betrayed when your favorite band signed to a major label, because they didn’t necessarily have to do that in order to keep making music. These days though, “selling out” is usually done out of necessity rather than greed. Sure, a sync for a Taco Bell or Walmart commercial probably isn’t most bands’ (or their fans’) idea of the best use of their music, but opportunities to do more than break even (if that) from tours and streaming residuals are increasingly scarce. Barring something like bands who’d play a festival sponsored by Lockheed Martin or let the U.S. Army use their songs in a recruitment video, most sellout accusations are just misdirected anger towards a corporatized industry that affords musicians little to no financial stability.

In a lot of ways, Charly Bliss feel like a pop band outside of their time, partially because bands don’t really dominate pop anymore. The closest thing to a contemporary mainstream pop band today would probably be something like HAIM or MUNA. Even a band like Paramore, who are bigger than the former two groups, already had a well-established foothold as one of the bands of the Warped Tour generation to retain their staying power by doing more than just coasting on their pop-punk legacy status. And when you think of the successors of that era who are achieving the same level of mainstream popularity, it’s solo artists like Olivia Rodrigo, who’s making a similar kind of music but has one-person name recognition—it’s not “The Olivia Rodrigo Band.” Both Eva and Sam bring up Olivia Rodrigo separately during our conversations, in both cases to talk about her status as a pop star whose stylistic inclinations aren’t far off from those of Charly Bliss—The Breeders, one of Charly Bliss’s biggest influences, are currently opening for Olivia Rodrigo on her U.S. stadium tour.

Charly Bliss tend to fit in everywhere and nowhere. “We’ve toured with PUP and Jawbreaker and Jimmy Eat World, but we’ve also toured with Bleachers and Glass Animals and CHVRCHES,” says Dan. “We’ve played with punk bands, pop bands, indie bands and everyone in between.” Somehow, the whole conversation about who or what qualifies as a “pop band” in 2024 devolves into a five-minute tangent about Imagine Dragons—or as Sam and Spencer calls them, “Envision Lizards” and “Conceptualize Reptiles,” respectively. A mention of the world-famous, vaguely-Christian, Las Vegas rock band causes the trio to start riffing all at once—Dan asks if I’ve heard about System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian calling out Imagine Dragons for performing in Israel and Azerbaijan (I have now), Spencer calls them “the modern day Creed” and breaks into an impromptu acapella rendition of “Thunder.” Sam is still cracking up at “Conceptualize Reptiles.”

“You know what Imagine Dragons is like?” asks Spencer. “You know how in Blue’s Clues they do the ‘one-two skidoo’? You ever been cut off by a Jeep with a Punisher sticker on the back window? [Listening to Imagine Dragons is] like doing a ‘one-two skidoo’ into a Blue Lives Matter bumper sticker.” Sam retorts, “You like ‘Believer!’” Spencer does not confirm or deny this, he only replies: “Stop imagining dragons, start imagining Charly Bliss fuckin’ headlining Barclays Center!”

Somehow the Imagine Dragons diversion brings us back to the question of what makes a modern pop band a pop band—and what makes Charly Bliss Charly Bliss. “A lot of people that love Guppy have a hard time accepting that we’ve always been a pop band,” says Sam. “Every song on that record has a big chorus. I get that the instrumentation is a little different, but what has always been true to the identity of our band is still true to this day.” Whether the melodies on Charly Bliss records are more guitar-dominant, like they are on Guppy, more synthy like they are on Young Enough, or a mix of both like they are on Forever, it’s all Charly Bliss sounding like themselves.

“All we’re trying to do—and all we’ve ever tried to do—is make songs that are authentically exciting and compelling to the four of us,” says Spencer. “What makes a Charly Bliss song is just us being like, ‘Does this honestly and earnestly excite us?’ And if the answer is ‘Yes, then it’s a Charly Bliss song.’”

“We wrote a lot of songs for [Forever] and a lot of them are really poppy,” Dan explains. “A lot of them sounded like a band you could hear on the radio—something like a Dua Lipa song. But it didn’t feel like us.” Coming from a band that recorded their debut album twice, this absolutely tracks. Spencer talks about listening to Guppy and Young Enough a lot during lockdown, and says that these two albums “sounded like a retrospective of our lives.” When I listen to Forever, it sounds like a continuation of that retrospective—as much as it can sound like that to someone who isn’t in Charly Bliss. The band’s evolution is easy to follow, and Forever feels like a logical connection of the dots without being a predictable one. With each record, Charly Bliss do a little more growing into themselves.

Sam says that Young Enough felt like a transitional album between Guppy and Forever. “We wanted to push our sonic boundaries but we were afraid to go all the way,” he continues. When he listens to Forever, he hears a freedom that wasn’t there on previous albums. “It was just like, we’re on different continents now! Let’s just write what we write and see what works.” All the members of Charly Bliss are in agreement—they’re having more fun than ever writing songs and performing them together, and they feel luckier than ever to be doing what they do.

Breaking free from the pressure to meet some critical or commercial standard was no easy feat. “We were raised in an incredibly competitive environment,” Sam laughs. “Someone should do a documentary about Westport, Connecticut.” The New England suburb has become something of a feeder community for breakout indie rock bands—El Kempner of Palehound and Missy Dabice of Mannequin Pussy both attended the same high school as the members of Charly Bliss, who shout-out these bands as ones they admire and are honored to have as their peers.

Despite this, they still struggle with the same feelings of insecurity and jealousy that are bound to crop up at some point when you’re working in a creative industry that pits artists against one another.“I’m uber-competitive to a fault,” Sam admits. “Things that would be fun for most people—I ruin the fun. It’s so unhealthy.” His bandmates laugh in agreement, and again, I think of “Capacity,” where Eva reflects on her and her bandmates’ upbringing: “I was raised an East Coast witch / Like doing nothing’s sacrilegious / Triple overtime ambitious.” Jealousy’s an unflattering and heavily stigmatized emotion, one that few artists are willing to speak candidly about—understandably so. For Charly Bliss, it’s not angry or vindictive, but a deeply human manifestation of their passion.

“It feels really amazing to be in a situation where you can break out of that box of being jealous of everyone who’s doing better than you, and being in a place where you can just be happy to see your peers doing well,” says Spencer. “It’s unavoidable at a certain point, but I feel lucky that we can just say ‘What we have is awesome, and what everyone else has is also awesome.’” Not to keep bringing it back to BRAT, but perhaps what we need is a Charly Bliss cover of the “Girl, So Confusing” remix, because inside those icons, there’s still some young kids from Westport.

From one Charly/i to another, all of the members of Charly Bliss are having a BRAT summer. Also in their heavy rotation is this year’s biggest breakout star, Chappell Roan. They love “Naked in Manhattan” and “Pink Pony Club.” Sam pronounces “Roan” like “Rowan,” and promptly gets roasted by Dan and Spencer, who, through word association, think of Mr. Bean actor Rowan Atkinson. All of this somehow culminates in Spencer bursting into song (again), this time singing the Magnetic Fields’ “Andrew in Drag” but swapping “Andrew” with “Mr. Bean” (“Mr. Bean in draaaaaaag!”). “You’re now seeing the true fucking Eye of Sauron of this band,” he says. “You transcribing this whole interview is gonna take years off your life.”

“I’m not gonna transcribe this whole interview, are you fucking kidding me?” I reply. It’s 2024, I have an app for that. “You’re not gonna transcribe ‘Mr. Bean in Drag?’” Sam asks, looking more than a little disappointed. I promise him that “Mr. Bean in Drag” will make it into the profile somehow. I am nothing if not a woman of my word.

The topic of music videos inevitably comes up, and it’s one that I’m eager to discuss, since their music videos are part of what got me into Charly Bliss when their music first appeared on my radar. My earliest memories of listening to their music are so intertwined with watching them playing a set on a fake public access TV show in the “Ruby” video, or running around a summer camp in the “Westermarck” one. Dan has directed many of their music videos, and he shouts out the videos of artists like Hot Chip and FKA twigs as inspirations to Charly Bliss’ visual aesthetic. Before Dan joined the band, he worked as a theatre director off-Broadway. The colorful campiness of the Charly Bliss videos he’s directed—be it the wacky teen comedy style of “DQ” or the blink-182-referencing “I Need A New Boyfriend”—match the manic energy and theatrical flair of their accompanying songs.

For the members of Charly Bliss, a music video is a way to expand the world of a song and give it a memorable visual component. They’re also a whole lot of fun to make. “Every time we get to shoot a music video it is truly just an excuse for the four of us to just hang out and have fun.” says Spencer. “It’s a way of exercising parts of ourselves that are more dramatized and theatrical. It activates so much of who we are as people. I can’t imagine our band without the music video we’ve made, it feels so integral to every record we’ve put out.”

It’s been freeing for Charly Bliss to figure out how their songs—new and old—will fit into their live setlists. With Guppy and Young Enough there were more opportunities to work through songs live before bringing them to the recording studio, but with most of the songs on Forever it’s been the opposite. “It’s just about what we can do to this song to make it a) sound compelling to us, and b) sound equally compelling to a crowd that came to see us,” Spencer explains.

Charly Bliss also love doing covers at their live shows, and they tend to gravitate towards songs that are easy to get excited about and sing along to—millennial crowd-pleasers like “Unwritten,” “Dancing on My Own,” and “Mr. Brightside”—and that the band themselves genuinely enjoy. “It’s not just baseless crowd service,” says Spencer. “Covering [“Mr. Brightside”] was so fucking energizing. Being able to cover one of the most electrifying songs ever written was a unique privilege.” Dan giggles at this and Spencer calls him out on it: “Do you disagree with that?”

“No, I just think you’re funny,” Dan replies. “You speak in hyperbole a lot.”

“I live my life in hyperbole,” Spencer responds. It’s a joke, but it’s also a fitting descriptor for Charly Bliss’s all-or-nothing approach to being a band. It’s not worth it if they’re not having fun, and they’re willing to take risks in order to see their vision through. “Nothing is hard proof / We made it come true,” Eva sings, on “Waiting For You.” At one point in its bright, fuzzy, sunset-toned music video, she picks up her mic stand and moves it closer to the rest of her bandmates, as though the sound is pulling her closer into their orbit. She presses her forehead to Dan’s and Spencer’s, ruffles Sam’s hair with her hand and, at the end, they all explode into a fit of wordless laughter—exuberantly, incandescently in love forever.

Watch Charly Bliss’ Paste Session from 2017 below.

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Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has appeared in The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.